Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry / 背诵与辞演：当代中国散文诗 [First ed.] 2016009472, 9780824856526

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Back Cover
Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry (背诵与辞演：当代中国散文诗)
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE What Is a Chinese Prose Poem? 什么叫中国散文诗？
CHAPTER TWO What Is the Tradition of Chinese Prose Poetry? 中国散文诗的传统如何？
CHAPTER THREE Orthodox Prose Poetry: Ke Lan and Guo Feng 当代正统散文诗：柯蓝与郭凤
CHAPTER FOUR Semi-Orthodox Prose Poetry: LiuZaifu 半正统散文诗：刘再复告别散文诗
CHAPTER FIVE Unorthodox Prose Poetry: Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan 非正统的中国散文诗： 欧阳江河与西川
Afterword: Summoning, Socialism, Prose
APPENDIX "Hanging Coffin" by Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河的《悬棺》
NOTES
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Citation preview

Con t e m po ra ry Chin ese Pro se Poet ry

CHINESE LITERATURE/ POETRY

"Recite and Refuse is an original, convincing, and truly inspirational book that rewrites conventional histories of prose poetry in China. Nick Admussen skillfully bridges the gap between orthodox and avant-garde texts while maintaining the significance of their distinction. His fascinating discussion of local political contexts feeds mto a theoretical argument with clear relevance to the study of prose poetry across national literatures. Beautifully written and expertly balancing word and world, Recite and Refuse will benefit students and scholars of Chinese and comparative literature and culture at every level." -MAGHIEL VAN CREVEL, Leiden University

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"A frequently asked question of students and general readers of poetry is: W hat is prose poetry? The apparent hybridity of the genre makes it seem deceptively easy and at the same time frustratingly protean. Focusing on mainland China from the 1950s to the l 980s, Admussen constructs an original theory of prose poetry with as much erudition as creativity. Combining insightful analyses and graceful translations, the book makes an important contribution to our understanding of Chinese prose poetry. " -MICHELLE YEH, Uni-versity of California, Dans

"This book is impressive. Its stunning sweep and detailed readings of prose poems make it a must-read, not only for anyone interested in modern and contemporary Chinese poetry but for those more broadly interested in modern Chinese literature who wish to keep up on current scholarly trends and what is going on in China. The author's reading ofOuyangJ ianghe's'Hanging Co伍n' is a tour de force." -CHRISTOPHER LUPKE, Washington State University

Jacket photo: Art installation called People 沁!ding Flowers（举花的人）byJi Wenyu计文千 and Zhu Weibing朱卫兵(2007). Jacket design: Mardee Melton ISBN 97

University of Hawai'i Press HONOLULU, HAWAI'I

1 1111 11111 1

RECITE AND REFUSE Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry 背诵与辞演：当代中国散文诗

Nick Admussen

圃 University of Hawai'i Press Honolulu

CONTENTS

@ 2016 University of Hawai'i Press All rights reserved

Ackiwwledgnicnts

Printed in the United States of America

Introduction

212019 18 17 16

Chapter One What ls a Chinese Prose Poem?

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Admussen, Nick, author. Title: Recite and refuse : contemporary Chinese prose poetry/ Nick Ad ipussen. Description: Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, (2016] I includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016009472 I ISBN 9780824856526 (doth: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Prose poems, Chines�-20th century-History and criticism. I Prose poems, Chinese-21st century-History and criticism. I Prose poems, Chinese-Translations into English. Classificnlion: LCC PL2309.P76 A34 2016 J DDC 895.l 1/5209-dc23LC record available at Imp://lccn.loc.gov/2016009472 Publlcalion has been supported in part by a grant from the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University.

University of Hawai'i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permam:nce and durability of the Council on Libraqr Resources,

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Chapte.rTwo What ls the Tradition of Chinese Prose Poetry?

35

Chapter Three Orthodox Prose Poetry: Ke Lan and Guo Feng

69

Chapter Four Semi-Orthodox Prose Poetry: Liu Zaifu

103

Chapter Five Unorthodox Prose Poetry: Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan

133

Afterword: Summoning, Socialism, Prose

163

Appendix: ''Hanging Coffin"

169

Notes

181

Glossary

205

Bibliogrnphy

.207

Index

217

y

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

珈s book is the proclucl of a large, altruistic comm uni Ly that has supported and challenged my research and writing, often for no reward save the possibility of contributing to the study of Chinese literature. Writing it would have been而 possible without the wisdom, insight, generosity, and care of Perry Link. I am also indebted to the talent and patience of professor Wang Ping E． 甲， anJ the e xpertise and vision of Michelle Yeh奚密， The support of Princeton University and the Donald and Mary Hyde Fellowship Fund allowed me to travel to China in 2008, where r benefited greatly from the sponsorship of professor Jiang Tao姜 涛, the knowledge and experience of Huang Yongjian黄水健，the support of Wu Xiaodong吴晓东，the tutelage of professors Zang Di臧棣and Zhang Taozbou张 桃洲，the friendship and grace ofBeijing University's Hu Yong胡泳，and the acu­ men of Yanzi燕了，who helped me accumulate what must now be New York's largest library of photocopied Chinese prose poetry. Chapter 1 contains "On Wang沁meng's Blue-green Landscape Scroll, A 71wusand Miles of Rivers a11d Mountains" by XiChuan, translated by Lucas Klein, from Notes 011 the Mosquito, copyright ©2012 JG Chuan. It is reprinted by permission of�ew Directions Pub­ lishi ngCorp. The second half of chapter 3 is deeply dependent on my experiences at Prose Poetry magazine in Yiyang, Hunan, where the present and past editorial staff, including Feng Mingde冯明饱and Zou Yuehan邹岳汉，treated me with warmth, openness, and sensitivity. In Sichuan, I was aided greatly by the hard work and good cheer of Mi Yue :�月，an editor at World ofProse Poetry. Chapter 3 was also substantively improved on the advice of a writing workshop convened byCornell professorAndreaBachner. Chapter4owesadebtto Liu Iianmei刘呻 and her falher Liu Zaifu刘再复， both of whom were extremely generous with their time and energy. Chapter 5 was made possible by a truly transformational reading of"Hanging Coffin" with professor Wang Ping, supported by rare docu­ ments supplied by Michael Day, and then rectified and tested during two very pleasurable afternoons spent with Ouyang Jianghe欧阳江河Chapters 4 and 5 were initially drafted during a fellowship with the Princeton Institute for Inter­ national and Regional Studies. 1 am additionally indebted to my teachers and ．．

VI1

viii

Acknowledgments

colleagues Jim Bonk, Maghiel van Creve!, Eric H ayot, Daniel Heller-Roaz.en,

Mick Hunter, Lucas Klein, Charles Laughlin, Paul M呻edi, Susan Stewart,

Wang Fuming干1陆明，邓ong Hui熊辉 ， Ye Minlei盯敏社，and Zhang Xiaohong 张晓红 ， aU of whom helped me finish this book whether they knew they were doing it or not. A partial version of chapter 2 appeared in the丿ournal Modem Chinese Literature and Culture, and I owe my thanks to tne careful and thoughtful revi­ sions of the editors and readers there; I presented part of chapter l at the 2010 meeting of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 、 part of chap• ter 4 at the 2011 meeting of the Modern Language Association, and part of chapter 2 at the 2012 meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. Arguments made in the last section of chapter 3 are related to ideas developed for a confer­ ence at Duke University, which became an essay in the Oxford Handbook of Mod­ ern Chinese Literatures. In each case, my panelists, editors, and other colleagues present provided crucial suggestions. Throughout this process I have had the great fortune to be supported by my friends and family, especially my wife and partner Emily Fridlund, who has pa­ tiently read numberless drafts of the project. I hope the final product justifies all her effort, as well as the support of all who contributed to this book, whether named here or not.

RECITE AND REFUSE

Introduction

This book argues that the cohesion of contemporary Chinese prose poetry as a genre comes not from its form, its politics, or its content, but from a particularly visible and visibly particular quality to its compositional process. Unlike other poetic forms whose lyrical exteriors seaJ off and occlude the story of the way in which they are made, Chinese prose poetry tends Lo display and even foreground the work of its makers. The process of the composition of prose poetry is impor• tant because this genre ls a hybrid form, an art that gestures outside itself to its raw materials, especially to prose genres and traditions. Prose poems recite and reproduce their raw materials in order to make their intervention visible: their intent is not only to produce an independent piece of art that contains its own history, but also to comment on and transform our understanding of prose. The chapters that follow discuss how and why Chinese prose poetry transforms Chi­ nese prose. Before we begin, though, it is worth thinking about the way in which this book is also an instance of cross-cultural and cross-generic transformation: as a prose composition in its own right, this book, too, has been deeply affected by my study of prose poetry. Wang Fuming called prose poetry "a beautiful mixed-blood child''; Ke Lan called it a "tiny liny heaven and earth"; Huang Yongjian has described it as "the literary darling of the age of pluralism.'' 1 These stalements do not agree, precisely, on the nature of the form or genre, but they do have something in common: they are libidinal, desirous. both telegraphing the pleasures of prose poetry and en­ gaging in the critic's pleasure at describing prose poetry. If we look at writing about prose poetry outside China, we see similar themes. Baudelaire describes it as a luxurious dream: "Which of us, in his ambitious moments, has not dreamed of the miracle of poetic prose, musical, without rhyme and without rhythm , sup­ ple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of the psyche, the prickings of consciousness?"1 Chinese prose poetry is a genre under way, and the poet and the critic alike succumb to the urge-one could call it a kind of lust, as we will see below-to shape the literature of the future. This book is driven bv that lust: taken together ils arguments are, at 1

1

Introduction

their heart, an invention of the genre. The invention and reinvention of Chinese prose poetry ls particularly crucial because it is one of a very few literary forms that have survived China's long, tumultuous twentieth century.1l1e zawen, a type of prose composition, was suppressed during the Mao period; other East-West poetic hybrids, like the verse forms invented by Bian Zhilin and Feng Zhi, became historical footnotes; the free verse that is written in today's China resists genre grouping even more strongly than prose poetry, ln a manner matched, perhaps, only by the short story, prose poetry has been inhabited and applied by every gen­ eration of modern Chinese writers: May Fourth authors like Liu Bannong and Lu Xun, Hundred Flowers writers like Guo Feng and Ke Lan, and post-Mao poets like Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan. To look at these disparate artists as a group potentially connected by their genre is to ask fundamental questions about how reading and writing operate in twentieth- and t wenty-first-century China. The genre's regard of prose means that inventions of the field of prose poetry also have the power to de1ine and illuminate the practice of prose. When people ask me about the specific location of tl1e bright line between prose poetry and prose, half the tjme [ have the impulse to respond that regardless of the answer­ because the answer is difficult-the question fascinates, the question helps consti­ tute prose, and the question should be lingered over rather ti}an simply closed by a cohesive theory. This book is a product of that fascination. The other half of the time, I have a separate response to the question of ge­ neric definition, one that also reflects one of this book's driving impulses: I want to refer people who ask about the difference between prose poetry and other prose to the huge number of Chinese people who daily and self-consciously use, define, debate. and destabilize the genre term samvenshi, or prose poetry. Many of those who ask, why is this a prose poem? would have trouble imagining that there is an office in present-day Hunan (and others in other ciUes) that says "Prose Poetry" on the door, inside which a half-dozen people work full time to read, edit, and pub­ lish prose poetry. This ls not exclusively a book of appreciation: while it is motivated by a version of Baudelaire's ambitious dream, it is also motivated by an ethics of interaction with artists, editors, publishers, readers, and other critics, Chinese prose poetry is constituted of its futurity and openness, but it is also made of concrete actions taken in the present and past by real people. It exists outside of and around its texts as a social practice. All participants, but perhaps especially critics, are connected to the community as a whole, and this book is motivated by a drive to act responsibly towards that community. If we represent, provisionally, the community of Chinese prose poetry through its texts, as the pile of printed material that bears the name sanwwshi. then that pile is enormous. It includes

lntroduction

3

multiple thousand-page anthologies, two magazines (one of them bimonthly), one newspaper, and hundreds of individual collections. If we widen the pile to include publications that print prose poetry alongside other types of poetry and prose, but are not exclusively identified as prose poetry publications, then an extremely broad slice of Chinese literary publication will be included, from elite literary magazines to Communist Party publications to a genre of mass-market maga­ zines such as Dt1zhe that are similar Lo America's Reader's Digest. Lf we widen the community further to discuss, as we will, peels who write short prose that re­ sembles prose poetry but who do not call it by the name sanwenshi, the people represented by all these texts must necessarily number in the thousands. It is impossible to be perfectly responsible to all those voices and all those texts, and yet the impulse remains.3 My sense of responsibility towards the prose poetry community involves the following desires: fast, to faithfully reproduce the events, ideas, and texts of the community in a way that is somehow representative of the raw experience of read­ ing large numbers of prose poems, and of meeting prose poets and editors. I have included a few poems in this book because they are representative of the bulk of the genre, and not because I think they are excellent; the straightforwardly ro­ mantic and impassioned voices of much of contemporary prose poetry are an in­ fluential part of the prose poetic community writ large, and I wanted to consider them with c;are even-especially-when their aesthetics contradict my own. Sec­ ond, I want to create a version of that social world that is accessible to people out­ side it-those without the time to read original materials, those who don't read Chinese, those who wouldn't otherwise know where to start to read Chinese prose poetry. finally, because this is a community of artists and people who believe in prose, this book should itself have aesthetic value-if only to protect my own place in the community of prose poets. These three responsibilities are ethics-of transla­ tion.They map roughly onto the three requirements of Yan Fu, a late nineteenth­ century translator into literary Chinese. He claimed that translations needed to possess fidelity (xin). fluency (da), and elegance (ya), and although these may seem like objective qualities, they are in reality highly social estimations of value constructed by readers.4 This was especially necessary in Yan Fu's context, which was the site of a burgeoning book trade and powerful transformations in literate and intellectual culture. ln times of change such as Yan Fu's, or in the tumultuous Chinese twentieth century during which prose poetry took root and grew, the �-uccess or failure of any given invention is necessarily disciplined and shaped by the consensus of community. This book is no exception: although motivated by the desire to invent and reinvent the category of prose poetry, it simultaneously

1

lntroduclion

attempts to stay connected at all points to some traceable person, practice, or Lexi in the field of Chinese prose poetry. In many cases, this means literal translation. With one exception, every chapter and section wlll begin with a translated poem or poems, both to tether the discussion to real work by real authors, and to make sure that the genre as I describe it is a genre that elucidates texts. The specific goals of prose poetry force critics like me into a tJ"Oublesome cycle: we must use prose to explicate poems which themselves act upon prose. The more powerful a poem is in ils effect on prose, the harder it is to look past the nature and effect of the prose of criticism. My response to the challenge is not to remove my discussion lo some more distant and objective level, but lo make this book con­ tingent upon and subject to the revelations of prose poetry. For example, the de­ scription of this book as driven by the lust for invention and the responsibilities of translation was provoked by the following two sections of "From Observation to Composition,'' written by Chen Dongdong in 2000: 7. Scenery TI1e emergence of scenery relies on observation. Prior to observation, scenery doesn't exist-scenery becomes itself when people regard it as scenery. But scenery can't truly be obs�rved as iLself without some kind of intentionality. The observation of scenery is compositional-it is only when one wants to see what they see as scenery that it is revealed to the eyes. Alternatively, it is readerly-it is only when you're told that you will see scenery that )'OU see it as such. In some of his notes, but not in poems, that person touched upon scenery again and again. Among them is a piece that goes on to talk about the lust for scenery8. The Lust for Scenery The lusl for scenery is unjustifiable. Like sexual lust. It Is uncertain, It is a psychological element that, at a particular moment, transforms the spirit and the body into something much more sensitive, almost sore, stretched, quivering, contorted, shrunk.en, experiencing high fever and nerve shock. It brings with it the secretions of memory, mixed into sweat, tears, milk and semen, It requires a suitable point of view, haLlucinatory eyes, a heart that reminisces and special, adjusted breath. As the blood shapes the lust for scenery it has the effect of distinguishing categories, just as it does with sexual lust. When the lust for scenery is spiking, the best way to quiet it is hypnotherapy-this is not a skill that every tour guide can master. To be precise, it is the skill of translation.$

Introduction

5

"From Observation to Composition" does exactly what it claims to do-iL de­ scrib es the process that begins with the seeing of an object and ends wilh the writing of a text. The series is, importantly, not titled "Observation Versus Com­ position": it is not primarily interested in what a composition does or does not reflec t about the original object, but instead the process by which we pass from seeing to writing. The piece's logics come not from ontology or epistemology, bul from narrative, psychology, and aesthetics. This is visible in the lyric break that takes place in the middle of section 8: section 7 asks whether intention or passiv­ ity can result in the perception of scenery (finding them inextricable), and opens the question of motive, which section 8 takes up. Its straight forward objectivil)', though, slips out of the groove during the discussion of scenery's effect on the viewer. The language becomes strange, exaggerated, tactile, sensual-we move very quickly from abstract overview to a truly intimatl' account, an experience so deeply affective that it is rooted in the body. The viewer enters the space between the reception of observations and the creation of the observed: ruJes are revoked, there is no theoretical limit to the satisfactions that the creations can bring, but also no limit to the anxiety that these creations will be unnatural, distasteful, or threatening, Translation-social action, connection to an imagined community­ appears as a stabilizing and comforting element, counteracting the isolation of invention. The antidote to the uncanny fever of the lust to see requires the kind of hard work that produces the trustworthiness of the seasoned tour guide. Chen's poem speaks very directly to the challenges this book faces and the solutions that give it shape. My scopophilic drive to view and organize and delin­ eate is present from the first moment of my encounter with the scene of prose poetry: it is subjective (accompanied by memory), hedonistic (like sexual lust), and not epistemologically healthy. To make this quality of the book transparent, l try to discuss the acts and impacts of scholarship as events that constitute the genre of prose poetry, to reveal them as part of its process: by opening literary criticism as itself a target for interpretation, I intend to counteract the putative transparency of academic prose and push back against, like Chen does, simple or mechanistic models of observation. 1 have also worked to make sure that in the following pages. the most engaging acts of imagination and invention are accom­ panied by the most detailed archive, and that the enticements of interpretation and systematization never move loo far afield from a broadly sharable experitmce of reading poems. Beginning each section with a translation or set of transla­ tions has forced me to speak, as much as possible, in the terms of others as well as my own, 'fbe balance between lust and translation is a description of how this book was composed; ensuing chapters will take up the questions of how, where, and why

6

I□troduction

prose poetry was and is composed. Chapter l traces the reading process through which I codified a metaphoric definition of prose poetry. It moves from the much­ discussed insufficiency of categorical definitions of the genre to the need to de­ scribe prose poetry as the product of particular compositional processes, then determines that we can describe those processes as the condensation of prose writing, the recitation of previous prose arl, and the refusal to be identical to pre­ vious prose art. Recitation and refusal are simultaneous and opposed: more than any other, it is the balance and tension between these two processes that produces contemporary prose poetry, and the processes described in this d1apter will serve as a hermeneutic entry into the poems that are translated and interpreted else­ where in the book. Chapter 2 traces the historical context of chapter l's definition for prose po­ etry, demonstrating the way that works of prose poetry written before 1949 lack strong generic identity, The variety of naming practices for pre-1949 poetry is contrasted with the codified, organized way prose poetry was described and de­ fended starting in the Hundred Flowers Movement. My periodization differs from many contemporary Chinese histories of prose poetry, although it does draw heavily from Chinese literary histories of other genres. The chapter then discusses what is retained and what is abandoned from the•pre-1949 prehistory of the contemporary genre. The second section of the chapter demonstrates that contemporary prose poetry does not have the subversive intent or effect that read­ ers correctly identify in Lu Xu n's early collection Wild Grass, and that readers of Western prose poetry have turned into a critical commonplace about the genre itself. Chinese prose poetry's particular brand of obedience has protected and en­ couraged the spread of the art form in the second half of China's tumultuous twentieth century. In place of Wild Grass, the chapter's third section identifies lhe most stylistically influential text for many prose poets, Bing Xin's translation of Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali. It finds that her translations produce a prosaic version of Tagore's sacral texts, plain speech with arching intent that will be a dominant mode in orthodox prose poetry. Chapter 3 turns to those orthodox prose poets. I draw the terms "orthodox" and wunorthodox" from the introduction to Unofficial China, where the editors point out the intense overlap between the "unofficial,'' or wugua11Ja11g, and the "unorthodox," buzhengtong. 6 1 use the word "orthodox" to represent a specific tra­ dition of highly committed prose poets who, among many other things, do their best to find ways to cooperate with and contribute to the Chinese state. The shape of their cooperation deeply influences their ideas about prose poetry, ideas that have become central to the national experience of the genre. Their dominant def­ initions, and the practices that accompany them, begin with two of the first self-

IntrnJuctio□

7

consciously self-identified prose poets in Chinese history, Ke Lan and Guo Feng, who wrote some of the first books sold as prose poetry, created and edited the first prose poetry-only magazines, founded the first prose poetry study groups, and wrote widely reproduced critical descriptions of prose poetry. These two authors' works are studied in depth, both lo understand the way their poetry founded the genre and to discuss the interactions among prose poetic practice, Mao-era poli­ tics, socialist culture, and the particular literary debates of the l950s-forces that still shape much about prose poetry today. 1l1e second halfof chapter 3 reads not poems, but the institutions, organizations, and power dynamics of the prose po­ etry community today as a key text of orthodox art. It finds that those shaping influences of the 1950s, including the intentional modeling of prose poetry com­ munities on the structures ofthe Chinese Communist Party (CCP), have produced a selofdynamics that are hierarchical, interorganizational, and self-reproductive. These d)'namics influence the composition o( prose poems through the interven­ tions of educators, editors, and study group administrators. The chapter finds that in many situations in contemporary prose poetry, it makes sense to see the author­ ship of individual poems as a set of multiple, distributed processes shared by many participants in the community. Chapter 4 is a close reading and author study of Liu Zaifu, a poet, scholar, and essayist who wrote prose poetry throughout the 1980s. As a member of the CCP's reformist wing affiliated with Hu Yaobang, in the early '80s Liu Zaifu continued prose poetry's tradition of finding a place for the subjective and the aesthetic in the objective world of socialist prose. The first half of the chapter engages with his aesthetic and social philosophy and its complex interventions into the politics of the l980s, and uses that engagement to read his best-known work, "Reading the Sea." The second half of the chapter traces the aesthetic, formal, and generic impact of Liu's exile on his work. Liu's post-exile works, published in Hong Kong, reveal the intimate connection between prose poetry and the political. social, and aesthetic community on the Chinese mainland: once Liu changes contexts, he stops writing prose poetry in favor of literary essays. His work and his career therefore prm'ide a crucial commentary on the line hetween orthodox and un­ orthodox prose poetry, and between prose poetry and other prose. Chapter 5 follows poets whose work exists in formal or generic relationship to prose poetry, but who reject or elude categorization as prose poets. Unlike the orthodox group ofchapter 3, these poets are quite diverse from one another both formally and ideologically. The chapter looks first at the poem "Hanging Coffin" by Ouyang Jianghe, one oflhe first post-1976 poems that was both monumental in size and written in a prose form, a piece that uses monumentality, rather than prose poetry's traditional brevity, lo engage with culture and history on a grand

8

Introduction

scale.'The end of chapter 5 tracks the way that avant-garde prose poet Xi Chuan fights against the identificatfon of his work with the settled, more categorically cohesive genre as practiced by orthodox poets. In doing so, he returns to a core distinction between prose poetry and other literary forms and practices: instead of belonging to a fi.,ced genre with a list of desiderata and taboos, Xi Chuan's works

CHAPTER ONE

What Is a Chinese Prose Poem? 什么叫中国散文诗？

of prose are acts that intervene in and shape the practice of prose. This position may or may not be the future of prose poetry, but it does take first steps towards building a future for prose: il tests, complicates, annihilates, and remakes prose, making it visible as a product of art and craft, using the techniques of prose poetry to return it from transparent instrumentality into the raw material of a living art The afterword argues that it is precisely the way that prose poetry makes prose visible that gives it such power and promise in contemporary China, as well as abroad. Recitation summons the voices of others into the present, and into the

He 归 nls lo see or touch the law, he wants lo approach and "enter� it, because perhaps he does nol know that the law is not to be seen or touched but deciphered. ” -De,·rida, "B吐rorc theLaw

present speaker: when prose poetry recites prose that is socialist, nationalist, capi­ talist, scientific, or religious, any forms assumed to contain and deliver truths, those claims are brought into a kind oflaboratory in which they can be tested, trans­ formed, or used for new purposes. This is especially crucial in contemporary

Insisting On Process Here is a piece of literature published in 2008:

China, where the power of the tradition of socialism floats in an uneasy vacuum. As we will see in historical contexts from the Hundred Flowers Movement to the

Say Wither, and the Peach Flowers Wither

1976 Tiananmen protests to the beginning of Chinese intellectuals'search for cul­

Zhou Genhong

turaJ roots, through prose poetry authors confront and answer questions about how we speak the truth, This book is intended to chronicle that confrontation, and also to engage in八．

How quickly they twist their bodies and leave、faster than falling from a precipice. [t is just this speed at which a flower departs from the little smile of spring, that disappearing silhouette, and flows to become lhe wide river face of day. And I am still immersed in a love that is for peach blossoms. It's such an expanse of time, such a spacious happiness. Spring's feel tiptoeing along the peach branch gather, little by little. They grip their lanterns, brightening all things. Al this moment, in the sky across which a flock of birds has flown, there remains 011.ly the clamor and chaos of tbe moment tbe peach flow­ ers turned. When I was flying with the peach flowers, and then after I had fallen, the peasant wives started to draw water, to clean rice, craning their necks away from the kitchen smoke. People went home, they sat at the dinner table, talked about tod ay 's peach flowers.

Peach flowers wither as fast as you can say wither. 1l1e whole earth sits there, glossy and round, clean, like a house where nobody lives, where the fragrance remains. But the wiJe earth is slowly, slowly, emptying il out.1

9

JO

Chapter One

How can we start-by reading the poem through the genre, which we do not yet understand, or by reading the genre through the poem, even though we have no proof that the poem fits the genre? And hasr't twentieth-century literary crit­ icism revealed genre as itself a brand of fiction? ln Acts ofLiterature, David Attridge points out the unfairness of the claim that Derrida's work deconstructs literature as a category or somehow argues against the possibility of finding it meaningful. Deconstruction, Attridge argues, takes place only in particular and individual acts of reading. 2 This chapter takes Attridge's argument to be true not just for acts of deconstruction, but for the construction of categories and genres as well: they are made up of, and cannot be demonstrated to exceed the scope of, individual acts of reading. The idea that Derrida's ideas do not apply equally to all literature, and are about the books he read-Paul Celan, Ulysses, Franz Kafka-instructs us to go directly to literary works and attempt lo draw categories while knowing, at some level, that the categories they lead us towards will be ephemeral and partial, dependent on the particular works we read. We are always reading the poem by constructing its genre nnd vice versa, and we never reach either a complete atomi­ zation of the poem or a completely universal idea of genre. This struggle be tween singular and plural is continually repeated by many participants in the artistic pro­ cess: an artist produces new poems by thinking them into or past the limits of one or another genre, an editor uses her perceptions of genre to determine which sub­ missions are exceptional, and a reader uses her understanding of genre to inter­ pret the poems she faces. The fact that this understanding is never complete or objective is no excuse for ignoring the task. We plant crops every year; we clear weeds exactly as fast as they grow, if we're lucky; to use Derrida's terms, we are driven to attempt to enter the infinitely nested gates of the law of genre until we are no longer able. 3 To hear the poem above tell it, the earLh is continually emp­ tying itself out-in entropy, in decay, in the fall from flight-onJy to be recon­ structed and refilled as the petals twist and dive. These theoretical positions are supported by the shape of the work of reading. When we see a poem (such as ·'Peach Flowers," above) taken out of its context In a magazine or anthology, we are likely to ask, what is it? before, after, or during our first reading of the poem. We may know that, as in the animal kingdom, any classification we give it is approximate: we may believe that it is a unique piece of art that ignores or confounds attempts lo categorize it; we may think that the undertaking of classification is futile, or has negative side effects. We ask anyway, and the question, what is it? and its answer, or the failure to arrive at an answer, is part of the experience of any poem. 1lle poem above first appeared in China's Prose Poetry magazine and was later collected in an anthology called 90 l'enrs of Chinese Prose Poetry. Commenters to the author's blog, where the poem also

What b a Chinese Prose Poem?

11

appeari., called it a poem (shi) as well as a prose poem (sa11wenshi), indicating that readers share the genre language of the author and his editor&.4 ln their role as creators ofliteralure, writers and editors can (and do) claim that virtually any­ thing is a prose poem simply by writing "prose poem" at the top of the page: this is what Derrida calls the "power to produce performatively the statements of the law."; This performance does not imply, though, the presence of an identifiable system. If the title "prose poem" is lo have any meaning, the act of naming is simply a starting point. What will be further necessary are acts of reading and interpretation: discoveries about the reasons that artists call their works prose poems anu Su, "Shiren Xi Chuan fangtanlu," n, p.

57. Tn.ng, "Xi Chu an women shenghuo zai juda de'rnaodunxiuci'zhong," n, p. 58. Xi, Shenqia11, 303. 59. Ibid.

60. Formally. I would tentatively identify alternative influences in Victor Segalen, who Xi

appreciates at length in Shenqfan, 195, and丿orge Luis Borges, who he reviews on Shenqia'I pp. 171-172 and discusses on pp. 241-242. Nei小er Segalen's intense cosmologica I lyricism n（汀 Borges's knotty philosophical prose arc qualities of Wild Grass, which swings from the qu印 and urbane lo the hallucinatory and revolutionary. 61. Xi has been published in China's Poetry（诗 刊） magazine, won the abovementioned

"Cultural China" prize in 2006 and the national Lu XLUt prize for liLeratllre (given by Lhe state• run Chinese Writers'Association) in 2001, and now serves as a professor of Classical Chinese

literature al the Central Academy of Fine Arts Jn Beijing. None of these instiLuLions 釭e con­ nected to prose poetry communities, but they do evince bis willingness 111 engage with official structures In certain circumstances. 62. Van Creve!, Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, MayhemanJ Mo11ey, 65. 63. Bourdieu,加Field of Cultural Prod11ctio11, 6. 64.而s strategy is common among avant-g盯de artists. See Kubin,''Wolfgang Kubin on Contemporary Chinese literature": "You can ask all the writers in mainland China and none

叭hem will voluntaril)'talk about the Writers Association. Nobod)'," 65. Van Creve!, Chinese Poetry in Times ofMind, Mnyhern and Money. 198-199. Jiang Tao quotes Xi as calling the piece a "poem that deviates from poetry,''Bakuntng de shou, 93. 66, This is possible in part because Ke Lan and his generation themselves nvoided and op• posed identification of prose poetry w心如long socialist poems written before and during the Hundred Flowers. 67. Van Creve!, Chinese Poet,.yin Times ofMind, Mayhem and Money, 229-230. 68. Geng, "Zhipu 1-hizhong you shensui," 70-71. for a Geng Linmang poem, see chapter 3. Huang, "Sanwenshi duoyuan wenhua shidai de weoxue cbong'er," 79. Huang also mentions 灿riefly in his literary history, seeing his work as evidence that free verse is evolving into more prose-like writing: Huang, Zho11gguo s(I/IWCns/II yml]IU, l27. 69. Day, China's Second World of Poetry, 33. 70. l have been challenged by deleted middles as well: I have institutional relationships with official prose poets and editors, but also a certain amount of interaction with avant-gard� poets. What I do not have is an interaction with large national poetry journals like Poetry Mag心11e《诗刊� and Stars Monthly《星居》 ， I he kind tl1at reprint prose poetry from both avant-garde and well-respected official magazines and that provided homes for safe and risky literature in the '80s and'90s. Their e.xperience would arid yet another layer of corn pl蚥ity to this and other critical conversations. 71. Xi, Notes on the Mosquito, 153.

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72. Xi Chuan is not ll1e only prose poet to have made a substantial impact on the future of prnse: as Michel Hockx writes the author of the world's first Chinese mfcroblog novel Wen Huajian闻悍脱also wrote prose poetry. See Ho吐x. /11ternet Literature lu C/Ji1111, 85-86. 令

201

73. Xi. Shmqlan. 280. 74. !bid., l.37. 75. Baudelaire, Little Poems in Prose, 7. Afterword I. Legge,加Chinese C/assit$, 268 2. Perloff, Unorfginol Genius, 169. 3. Xi, Notes 011 the Mosquito, 248. 4. !hid., 249. 5, In order from the top, these are from chapter 15, quotation two; chapter 17, quotation six; and chapter 31, quotaUon seven, all in Mao, Qt10/alio11s. Append.ix Epigraph. Diderot, Jaques lefataliste, 19. l. The title refers to Empress Wu Zetian's "Wordless Stele"（无字碑）， a �tune memorial

near her tomh atQianling on which no writing is inscribed. The "Book nf Heaven"（天书）is a term with many historical layers: a bnok th釭is divinely written and thus completely incom­ prehensible lo regular men and women; an imperial edict nr command, especially one that is written from the absolute heights of power (and is therefore aho difficult for mol'lals lo inter­ prel); or, in common parlance, nonsen�ical writing.

2. Plum rains（梅百）or lhe plum days（黄梅天）are a name for the weather offune and July in the middle and lower renches of the Yangtze river, where Ouyang)ianghe saw hanging cof­ fin� in the early 1980s. 3. All uses of "hang" in血s section use the same word as the title does: x111111（悬）．The

、

hanging coffin is a largely outhern Chinese burlru praclke . common among non-Han peoples like �he Bo（赞）in northern Yunnan an i11 the shadow it inv-.iriably casts. 22. From the opening of the Z/111a11gzl. 23. "Who stays and who goes''would later serve 11s the title of one of Ouyang Jianghe's col lections. See Ouyang, Shei qu s/iei liu. 24. Like a coffin banging in a dug-out niche in 1t cliffside.

霉

25. Traditionally, the poisons of the five poisonous creatures: sct)rpion, viper. centipede,

lizard, und toad .

26. Referri n g to a Tnng dynasty poem by Cui Shu崔曙called绿山庙，the伽al line of which is,“天高小可伺掩泣赴行舟"or, approxjmately,“如sky (Heaven) is so high that it cannot be questfoned, I mu印e my sobs and set off in my boat." 27. This allusive sentence contrasts Mao's reputed willingness to sacrlfice Chinese lives for geopolitical purposes with Mao-era narratives that claimed the PLA to be perfectly suited 10

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the villagel> thal made up !ls power base: see "On Guerrilla Warfare''in Mao, /ielecled Works, vol. 6. 28. Images of lone fishermen were fre4uently uied in classical poetry lo express isolati()n _ or lonelines;, for example in the seventh of Du Fu's杜甫eight''Autumn Meditations''秋兴 29. The "Human Face and Fish PaLtern Pot"人巾鱼纹陶盆is a Joie Neolithic piece of deco­ rated pottery d iscovered near Xi'an in 1955, It is decorated with a curious human face sur­ rounded and superimposed by pictures offish and frsh-scale designs. 30. A double meaning with the "wooden fish"木鱼，a wooden percussion instrument used to provide rhythm Juring some BuJdhist worship . 31 I比s sentence can be l n l己rpre1ed lIlmlly 、 or abstractly, as Communist red :''the first red" is a sentence often complt:tecl with nouns like''army brigade" or "educational textbook." referring to the time immeJiately around 1949 w'wn the C:CP was reorganizing mainland Chinn, anti before the cost (the "sacrificial grave goods") was wid ely known.

32. Also "all creation sympathiZe6 with each other." 33, A Buddhist term for the shortest describable period of time, technically one seventy-

陆h of a second. 34. The sentence refers to a common topic for the composition of classical poetry:花开无上 can be lnterpreted in manywnys, but for present purposes !lean be translated as "flowers open

without orders from the master.''a statement of lhe lack of hierarchy or dominance in the nat=al world. Jo the lasl sentence of the para臣aph, the underground maga让nc Han shi h88 怒怖. and Ouyang, "Xuan Guan" in Di sun dais/ii xinbinn has恐怖．ln consultation with Ouy­ ang, I take the word as怒放 ，“in full bloom." 35, Referring to the Shi /i11g ode t七月l, Mao 11154, which is a plaint about poor treatme nt of the peasant. The poem says tbal in the seventh month, Mars crosse, the meridian inU1e sky and the weather rnrn:; �uld, but warm clothing is n::>l d体tributed until th, 12-16. 76,123,137 Creve!,Maghid nn, 153-154, 157-158 Cultural Revolution, 26-29,48, 63,80, 97, 107-108

!oven�. Paola, 97

Day,Michael, 149,159, 19711.l Derrida, Jacques,9-11. 181 n.3, 184n 55 LJ11zlie magazine, 3 �ven-Zohar, ltamar,85. 91, 100 J=ang \Venihu. 36-37, 51,82-83 Feng Mingde, 84, 86, 89-90,19ln.53 Geng Linmang, 98-99, I un, 158 Guo Feng,7, 49, 51, 69-70, 72, 73, 74-79,83, 111, I92n.53 Guo Moruo, 38, 40-41 Hai Meng, 86, 90-91, I 92n.53 Heidegger, Martin. 18-19 Hockx, Michel. 85, l86n.29, 2U0n.72

Kaidis, N1cholas, 44, 64, 183n.28, J85n.8 K